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While migrants can receive mail at the city’s shelters, many have struggled to track down important correspondence, according to legal service providers and advocates—especially after the city restricted the length of stays for both adults and families with children.
A Crown Heights building in limbo could inspire more landlords to deregulate through demolition—or more tenants to fight to stay in their homes.
Community-based organizations are primed and ready to help New Yorkers deal with extreme weather events but say they need more robust communication, engagement, and financial resources from the city. “This is about long-term cultivation of capacity at the street level,” said Rebecca Bratspies, director of CUNY Law’s Center for Urban Environmental Reform. “And we need it because we’re going to be facing this over and over again.”
Federal law that protects the educational rights of homeless children and youth under 21 says young adults should be enrolled in school immediately, but the city is not meeting this requirement, advocates say. They report newly arrived immigrant youth being placed on waiting lists, told there are no spaces, or advised to take the General Educational Development (GED) high school equivalency test instead.
As a bill that aims to drastically cut the use of plastic packaging gains momentum in Albany, the chemical industry has increased spending to stop it, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the effort.
The Dept. of Buildings has the power to offer a mediated resolution to landlords who don’t comply with the city’s building emissions law, bypassing fines if they promise to get back on track. But lawyers fear the provision leaves the door open for DOB to evoke it too freely, and question whether the agency has the staff capacity to monitor such deals.
More than a quarter of the city’s public school buildings are currently at risk from extreme stormwater flooding, according to an analysis by the Comptroller’s Office shared with City Limits. Teachers, students and environmental groups are pushing for more weather-resilient schools.
The volume of cash assistance applications in New York City has increased dramatically in recent years. But as more households receive aid, the city is also issuing more procedural denials, in the hundreds of thousands.
Gov. Hochul tried to water down a bill that sought to stop companies that have contracts with the state government from contributing to tropical deforestation. Now, lawmakers plan to reintroduce the bill and fight for its integrity.
While the Adams administration has been issuing shelter deadlines to adult immigrants for months, and to some families with kids in hotels as part of a separate initiative, Tuesday’s evictions were the first to apply to families with children under City Hall’s broader policy, which officials say is an effort to manage more than 168,500 new arrivals since 2022—69,000 of whom remain in the city’s care.
With additional city agencies now providing more emergency lodging than ever before in a system that officials say is at a breaking point, monitoring the total number of people in shelter has only become more important—and more complicated.
City Limits uses investigative journalism through the prism of New York City to identify urban problems, examine their causes, explore solutions, and equip communities to take action.
Founded in 1976 in the midst of New York’s fiscal crisis, City Limits exists to inform democracy and equip citizens to create a more just city. The organization is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit funded by foundation support, ad sponsorship and donations from readers.
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